Giles Watson's poetry and prose
Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and Palimpsests
I have put together my collection of paraphrases of the works of the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It contains 52 poems by Dafydd, and an elegy by Iolo Goch, and also features some of the illustrations I have used when I have been uploading the poems to Flickr. I'm not expecting Dafydd to suddenly depart because the book is (sort of) 'out'; I suspect there will have to be a second edition some time in the future. My big thanks to everyone who has encouraged me in this project over the past five years.
The whole collection can be seen here:
www.scribd.com/doc/29424634/Dafydd-ap-Gwilym-Paraphrases-...
Here is the revised Preface to the book:
Preface
by Giles Watson
Dafydd ap Gwilym was an extraordinarily skilled poet, but he remains little known outside his native Wales. This is not because he wrote in the fourteenth century, for Chaucer was his contemporary. He is comparatively obscure because he wrote in Welsh, but it is also true that he achieved the greatest heights of artistry for the same reason. Whilst his poetry was not as ambitious in scope as Chaucer’s, it presented a greater technical challenge. He wrote in cywyddau, couplets of seven syllables each, but the lines themselves were also given cynghanedd (harmony): complex sequences of alliterations, assonances and half-rhymes . No living language is as perfect for such treatment as Welsh. The effect is mesmeric, frequently with the force of an incantation, and must have been more so with a harp accompaniment: an instrument with which Dafydd himself was proficient. It is also an effect which is virtually impossible to achieve in English translations.
The poems contained in this booklet are not translations. Readers will find excellent and exact prose renderings of Dafydd’s best poems in Rachel Bromwich’s scholarly and sensitive Dafydd ap Gwilym: A Selection of Poems, Helen Fulton’s Dafydd ap Gwilym: Apocrypha, and in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s Celtic Miscellany . Indeed, I am not qualified to offer any sort of translation, since I am not a Welsh-speaker. My sole justification for writing these paraphrases is that I have felt an affinity with Dafydd ever since I bought a copy of Bromwich’s translations, the day after my parents and I were almost swept away by a flood during a visit to Beddgelert in North Wales. Dafydd was, and remains, an authority on the only two subjects which Robert Graves was prepared to accept as the true matter of poetry: love and nature. Brought up in the Christianised culture of mediaeval Wales, he did not forget his country’s pagan roots, and referred to the heroes and cosmology of the Mabinogion with the same reverence he demonstrated for God, Mary (transliterated in my paraphrases as Mair) and the saints. He was also emotionally honest to the point of blasphemy: invoking saints for assistance in illicit love affairs, and freely admitting that nothing he encountered in Church was quite as vibrant as the greenwood. Finally, he was a poet who cared passionately about cadence, as all poets should. I have tried, if not to restore, then at least to emulate Dafydd’s cadences, although at times I have found it necessary to jettison his strict seven-syllable lines (let alone the cynghanedd) in order to achieve a reasonable balance of metre and meaning . I have taken considerable liberties, but have not, I hope, subverted his overall intentions.
Dafydd invented, followed, and flouted a range of conventions, and these are roughly reflected by the section headings of this collection. First, there are the poems in which the speaker claims to have constructed an abode in the greenwood, suitable for clandestine trysting with his beloved. The covert nature of the assignation is nearly always necessitated by the fact that the beloved is married to someone else – a cuckold who is commonly named Eiddig – or because the speaker has not met the approval of the girl’s father. Often, it seems, this background is mere scaffolding on which to hang a poem in praise of nature, and in one case, (‘The Wounded Thorn’), Eiddig plays an active part in destroying the greenwood trysting-tree. It seems very likely, however, that Dafydd was also writing from personal experience, and it is easy to believe that the two named lovers in his poems – the dark-haired Dyddgu and the blonde-haired Morfudd – really existed. We have it on Dafydd’s authority that he first met Morfudd at a mystery play in Bangor Cathedral, but despite his ceaseless protestations of love, it seems that she married another, and that her husband was violent towards her. Dafydd made verse appeals for the approval of Dyddgu’s father, but does not appear to have received it. In addition to these two, whose names were almost certainly appropriated by other, later poets, Dafydd also expresses his affection for certain nuns, and thereby inaugurates another enduring tradition.
The llatai convention was invented by Dafydd himself, and is the main subject of a number of his poems, some of which testify to his skills as an observer of nature. These involve the poet addressing an animal, or even an elemental force such as the wind, with a request to carry a message to his beloved. One at least one occasion, Dafydd receives a llatai from his lover – as opposed to sending one out himself – and in one case, the llatai is revealed in a dream. These poems have their own peculiar magic, and are undoubtedly rooted in the shape-shiftings of Welsh mythology. For this reason, I have included Dafydd’s poem about that archetypal shape-shifter, Blodeuwedd, in the section on love-messengers. The sympathetic tone of this poem is in marked contrast with another poem on ‘The Owl’, which introduces some of the love messengers who are cursed by Dafydd for bringing bad news. Not only mammals and birds serve as love-messengers; the elements and heavenly bodies do so too, and again, sometimes they are blessed, and sometimes cursed, by Dafydd.
Perhaps it is not surprising - given that the illicit nature of Dafydd’s love affairs required him to hold his trysts in the cover of the greenwood - that Dafydd wrote a number of poems in which he extolled the virtues of the summer months, and scorned the winter. Some of these poems extol a natural spirituality which is refreshing in its simplicity. These are balanced by more introspective poems in which Dafydd either argues with himself (or, in one notorious case, a part of his anatomy), or becomes embroiled in a disputation with a friar. Here, honesty is combined with a humorous self-irony which modern readers ought to find endearing. Finally, there are the poems in which Dafydd extols the virtues of powerful men; the two examples I have included here are elegies, and it seemed fitting to round off the collection with my own deliberately loose paraphrase of Iolo Goch’s elegy to Dafydd himself.
Much paper has been wasted – and much academic energy fruitlessly expended – in debating which poems attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym by the manuscripts ought actually to belong to the ‘canon’. Although I have mentioned some of these controversies in my notes at the end of each poem, my opinions are based on instinct alone. It is certainly true that other poets passed their work off as Dafydd’s own, but the mediaeval notion of authorship was not as fixed as ours, and the criteria by which I have made my selection are not scientific. There are, however, certain features which, whilst they cannot be said to constitute litmus tests for Dafydd’s authorship, would certainly help to earn Dafydd’s own stamp of approval. They are: a refusal to allow the strictures of any moral or religious code to impede poetic sympathy for a person who is in love, a selfless and unswerving devotion to beauty, a preference for the natural over the artificial, an acute skill for the close observation of nature, and most importantly, a generous helping of self-irony. There is nothing surprising or unique in this. These are, in fact, the most fundamental characteristics of any poet who deserves the name. What is unique is Dafydd’s distinctive voice. I cannot begin to explain how it sounds, but I know it when I hear it, and if these paraphrases can catch even some of his inflexions, they will have done their duty.
Dafydd ap Gwilym: Paraphrases and Palimpsests
I have put together my collection of paraphrases of the works of the fourteenth century Welsh poet Dafydd ap Gwilym. It contains 52 poems by Dafydd, and an elegy by Iolo Goch, and also features some of the illustrations I have used when I have been uploading the poems to Flickr. I'm not expecting Dafydd to suddenly depart because the book is (sort of) 'out'; I suspect there will have to be a second edition some time in the future. My big thanks to everyone who has encouraged me in this project over the past five years.
The whole collection can be seen here:
www.scribd.com/doc/29424634/Dafydd-ap-Gwilym-Paraphrases-...
Here is the revised Preface to the book:
Preface
by Giles Watson
Dafydd ap Gwilym was an extraordinarily skilled poet, but he remains little known outside his native Wales. This is not because he wrote in the fourteenth century, for Chaucer was his contemporary. He is comparatively obscure because he wrote in Welsh, but it is also true that he achieved the greatest heights of artistry for the same reason. Whilst his poetry was not as ambitious in scope as Chaucer’s, it presented a greater technical challenge. He wrote in cywyddau, couplets of seven syllables each, but the lines themselves were also given cynghanedd (harmony): complex sequences of alliterations, assonances and half-rhymes . No living language is as perfect for such treatment as Welsh. The effect is mesmeric, frequently with the force of an incantation, and must have been more so with a harp accompaniment: an instrument with which Dafydd himself was proficient. It is also an effect which is virtually impossible to achieve in English translations.
The poems contained in this booklet are not translations. Readers will find excellent and exact prose renderings of Dafydd’s best poems in Rachel Bromwich’s scholarly and sensitive Dafydd ap Gwilym: A Selection of Poems, Helen Fulton’s Dafydd ap Gwilym: Apocrypha, and in Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson’s Celtic Miscellany . Indeed, I am not qualified to offer any sort of translation, since I am not a Welsh-speaker. My sole justification for writing these paraphrases is that I have felt an affinity with Dafydd ever since I bought a copy of Bromwich’s translations, the day after my parents and I were almost swept away by a flood during a visit to Beddgelert in North Wales. Dafydd was, and remains, an authority on the only two subjects which Robert Graves was prepared to accept as the true matter of poetry: love and nature. Brought up in the Christianised culture of mediaeval Wales, he did not forget his country’s pagan roots, and referred to the heroes and cosmology of the Mabinogion with the same reverence he demonstrated for God, Mary (transliterated in my paraphrases as Mair) and the saints. He was also emotionally honest to the point of blasphemy: invoking saints for assistance in illicit love affairs, and freely admitting that nothing he encountered in Church was quite as vibrant as the greenwood. Finally, he was a poet who cared passionately about cadence, as all poets should. I have tried, if not to restore, then at least to emulate Dafydd’s cadences, although at times I have found it necessary to jettison his strict seven-syllable lines (let alone the cynghanedd) in order to achieve a reasonable balance of metre and meaning . I have taken considerable liberties, but have not, I hope, subverted his overall intentions.
Dafydd invented, followed, and flouted a range of conventions, and these are roughly reflected by the section headings of this collection. First, there are the poems in which the speaker claims to have constructed an abode in the greenwood, suitable for clandestine trysting with his beloved. The covert nature of the assignation is nearly always necessitated by the fact that the beloved is married to someone else – a cuckold who is commonly named Eiddig – or because the speaker has not met the approval of the girl’s father. Often, it seems, this background is mere scaffolding on which to hang a poem in praise of nature, and in one case, (‘The Wounded Thorn’), Eiddig plays an active part in destroying the greenwood trysting-tree. It seems very likely, however, that Dafydd was also writing from personal experience, and it is easy to believe that the two named lovers in his poems – the dark-haired Dyddgu and the blonde-haired Morfudd – really existed. We have it on Dafydd’s authority that he first met Morfudd at a mystery play in Bangor Cathedral, but despite his ceaseless protestations of love, it seems that she married another, and that her husband was violent towards her. Dafydd made verse appeals for the approval of Dyddgu’s father, but does not appear to have received it. In addition to these two, whose names were almost certainly appropriated by other, later poets, Dafydd also expresses his affection for certain nuns, and thereby inaugurates another enduring tradition.
The llatai convention was invented by Dafydd himself, and is the main subject of a number of his poems, some of which testify to his skills as an observer of nature. These involve the poet addressing an animal, or even an elemental force such as the wind, with a request to carry a message to his beloved. One at least one occasion, Dafydd receives a llatai from his lover – as opposed to sending one out himself – and in one case, the llatai is revealed in a dream. These poems have their own peculiar magic, and are undoubtedly rooted in the shape-shiftings of Welsh mythology. For this reason, I have included Dafydd’s poem about that archetypal shape-shifter, Blodeuwedd, in the section on love-messengers. The sympathetic tone of this poem is in marked contrast with another poem on ‘The Owl’, which introduces some of the love messengers who are cursed by Dafydd for bringing bad news. Not only mammals and birds serve as love-messengers; the elements and heavenly bodies do so too, and again, sometimes they are blessed, and sometimes cursed, by Dafydd.
Perhaps it is not surprising - given that the illicit nature of Dafydd’s love affairs required him to hold his trysts in the cover of the greenwood - that Dafydd wrote a number of poems in which he extolled the virtues of the summer months, and scorned the winter. Some of these poems extol a natural spirituality which is refreshing in its simplicity. These are balanced by more introspective poems in which Dafydd either argues with himself (or, in one notorious case, a part of his anatomy), or becomes embroiled in a disputation with a friar. Here, honesty is combined with a humorous self-irony which modern readers ought to find endearing. Finally, there are the poems in which Dafydd extols the virtues of powerful men; the two examples I have included here are elegies, and it seemed fitting to round off the collection with my own deliberately loose paraphrase of Iolo Goch’s elegy to Dafydd himself.
Much paper has been wasted – and much academic energy fruitlessly expended – in debating which poems attributed to Dafydd ap Gwilym by the manuscripts ought actually to belong to the ‘canon’. Although I have mentioned some of these controversies in my notes at the end of each poem, my opinions are based on instinct alone. It is certainly true that other poets passed their work off as Dafydd’s own, but the mediaeval notion of authorship was not as fixed as ours, and the criteria by which I have made my selection are not scientific. There are, however, certain features which, whilst they cannot be said to constitute litmus tests for Dafydd’s authorship, would certainly help to earn Dafydd’s own stamp of approval. They are: a refusal to allow the strictures of any moral or religious code to impede poetic sympathy for a person who is in love, a selfless and unswerving devotion to beauty, a preference for the natural over the artificial, an acute skill for the close observation of nature, and most importantly, a generous helping of self-irony. There is nothing surprising or unique in this. These are, in fact, the most fundamental characteristics of any poet who deserves the name. What is unique is Dafydd’s distinctive voice. I cannot begin to explain how it sounds, but I know it when I hear it, and if these paraphrases can catch even some of his inflexions, they will have done their duty.